Search with Design

Every designer has heard the story about the lady in the park asking Pablo Picasso to sketch her. She loves his drawing and asks how much, he says 50,000 pesos or dollars or pre-euros or whatever. She gasps why, it only took you five minutes. He says I’ve worked my whole to be able to do this. Boom.

Lessons

1. Work your whole life.

2. Sit in parks with bohemian women waiting for them to recognize you.

3. Inflate your prices and hope some finally pays up.

I’ve always tried hard as a designer to understand why other designers love this story.

I try and think logically, but quickly fall into self loathing and despair. Does this mean I’m not a designer because I don’t get it?  Should I work hard or smarter? Or am I too stupid to work smarter so I might as well toil my days over? Or should I pretend I understand it? “Yeah, it’s art, so you wouldn’t get it.” Or can you just call it like you see it, regardless if its an urban legend or not.

Pablo understand one thing very well, to be an artist you needed to sell your work. To do that professional for a living you needed an audience. So he found one in several different ways. He had initial talent, which got him some attention. Then he branched off and created something new among his close peers. This made him stand out, which gave him more attention. But he, like many artists before him, realized that just being and thinking differently wasn’t enough, you needed something more than stories and ancedotes, rumors and headlines to be a professional artist, you still needed works. Which means you needed to work.

Many artists had talents understudies that would learn under the masters and help finish up certain painters or even copy a work completely and then have the original artist sell those copies using their name. But some works take more than just hours, they take weeks or even months. So what did Picasso do, create an artistic painting in the least possible brush strokes. He didn’t create minimalism. He created worktheleastism. More paintings in front of more people at the same time, during his lifetime afforded him the maximum exposure that would allow him to remain a professional artist, doing whatever he pleased with his time, money and women.

Pablo Picasso was a brilliant marketer, acting on the timing of his previous success to push him in front of a larger and larger audience. He didn’t spend his lifetime perfecting his fine brush strokes. As he aged, his hand and eye both became thick and lazy. He mastered the business of art. He captured attention, produced quantity and charged heavily.